Turn Your Prospect List Into A COMMUNITY

Hey. Hey. Welcome back to this week's coaching video. Today I'm going to share with you probably the best prospecting tip I will ever give you. You need to start looking at your prospects like a community and stop looking at them like this list of prospects. What do I mean? That's what we're going to dive in today's coaching video. Here we go.

Shift your mindset. So what the heck do I mean when I say it's time for you to build a community? Andy, isn't my list really just a list of prospects? Yes, and that's your problem. You see, if you're looking at your long list of prospects, which might be fifty hundred prospects, long as one big list you can win business from, they've all got dollar signs over their head. You've already lost. Everything changed in 2020. I know. I've said this repeatedly. The way you connect with your prospects, the way you build a relationship with them, the way you move them through a pipeline. And it all changed, and we're not going back. More importantly, those buyers you're trying to win business from are smarter than they've ever been. You can't hold everything inside until you get hired. You have to bring value now and more value than your competition. That is what I mean when I talk about building a community. I've been having a lot of conversations with insurance advisors here in January who have some pretty slothy sales goals this year. I'm hearing numbers of 150,000, 250,000, $500,000. If you're going to have that kind of goal, do you realize what kind of pipeline you have to have? Here's an example. If you want to write $250,000 this year, you probably need a pipeline of about 750,000 to get there. So my question to you is, what are you doing right now to nurture your prospects to create a thriving pipeline totaling $750,000 of potential revenue? No, no. Not a pipeline where a third of your prospects are horse crap. I've been there. My early insurance sales career was filled with pipelines of prospects that were never going to do business with me. But it felt so good. It felt confident to go in the sales meeting and say, look at my pipeline. Even though a third of them were crap, you have to stop that. You see, when you look at your prospects just as nothing more than a list. You're just trying to figure out ways to win business from them. A community is something you bring value to. A list is something you just try to extract Sales from. So how do we go about building a community? Alright, here's where we start. I want you to sit down and I want you to look at those list of prospects you have today. Again, might be 50 of them. 100, 250. I want you to think about all the ways you can bring value to them today without wanting a damn thing in return. Can you host a series of webinars? Can you start sending out emails consistently that actually bring them value? Can you look at the list and say, hey, I think I connect. If I connect this prospect to this prospect, they could really benefit each other's business. I know it does nothing for me, but you know what? It actually, it does something for them that is community. Too many insurance professionals right now are looking at their prospect as nothing more than a list. And all they're doing every single day is asking for business, asking for meetings, asking for the sale. There's no value there. Let me give you an example. Here is the greatest way you can start building community today. Imagine you pick up the phone and call a prospect today and say, you know what? I really like what you have to say, but the timing isn't good. Give us a call back in August. Here's what most insurance professionals do. They hang up the phone, they don't do a damn thing for seven months. They pick the phone back up in August and that call is as cold, if not colder, than it was today. That's a list of prospects that you're trying to win business from. When you build community, here's what you do. Before you hang up the phone today, you say, listen, I respect that. But here's what I want to invite you to. I have a community of prospects that I share content with. I have emails I send out, I have webinars that I host. I have a podcast that I bring my prospects on. But it's a community where I am sharing value every single week with them to help them win. I'd love for you to be part of that community if that's something you want to do. Most of the time they're gonna be like, yeah, that sounds cool. Now, over the course of those next seven months, you're bringing value to them on a weekly basis. So when you make that call in August, they're more than happy to set up a meeting with you. That is community. So where do you get started? I want you to look at that list today and I want you to say, okay, where can I start bringing value? 1, start sending out better emails. Create a community around the emails you send out, whether you do it on a weekly, a bi weekly basis, a monthly basis. How can you start writing better emails that actually bring value? Not the company newsletter, not Updates from Washington D.C. nobody cares about. No, no, no, no. What can you do to type up emails that actually help your prospects win? Number two, webinars. How can you start hosting a series of webinars on a monthly or quarterly basis where you are bringing a ton of value to those prospects? You're bringing subject matter experts on that can teach your prospects things they don't know today that can help them win again. How can you pair one prospect up with another so they can have a mutually beneficial relationship? Maybe you have free advising sessions throughout the year where you have prosperity prospects who come on, ask you questions and you just give free advice. I know it sounds crazy, but this is how you win in 2021. And moving forward, you have to build a community. You have to bring more value than your competition if you want to win business again. You can't wait till the agent of record letter to actually share the value bring. You have to start doing it right away. So do yourself a favor, do your sales goals a favor this year. Start looking at your list today and figuring out how you can turn it into a community. Because when you turn it into a community, that list will turn into gold. And here is the most amazing thing that happens when you build a community around your prospects. Number one, it's something they want to be a part of. And number two, when you apply a little consistency and patience to bringing value, to impacting that community over time, you will become the go to that they recognize, you will become the authority they recognize and you will have a list of prospects that start reaching out to you to do business. Doesn't that just sound a whole hell of a lot better than picking up the phone every day and saying, just checking in to see where you're at with your decision making, or sending an email saying, hey, haven't heard from you in a while, can we connect because I'd like to sell you something again now when you get up every day saying how in the world can I impact this list? How in the world can I bring value to this community? Not this list, man. Magical things happen. So do yourself a favor today. Start building a community around your prospects again. This is the best prospecting tip I will ever give you. I've been proud of building the complete game community around advisors like you because it's about bringing value. Do that today and you will win more business than you have ever won before. In 2021 will be the year that you smash through those sales goals you have set for yourself. Alright. You know what happens when clarity and confidence collide? Massive action happens. Go take it today and start building that community.